Chapter 13
brODY
“I rreconcilable differences?” I guess as I pull up a new client file on my computer. Scanning over the document, I nod. “Irreconcilable differences.”
It isn’t that I wish people had worse things happen in their lives, but sometimes, it might be nice for the potential client to submit something that would get my blood pumping.
Soft jazz plays quietly as I take notes and read through a handful of documents waiting for me. I don’t often like to listen to music, but I find it relaxing in my home office. Dim lights, nice music, and lately, a whole lot of ugly on my screen.
It creates balance.
Reaching next to my keyboard, I lift my ringing phone to my ear as I continue working. “Yello?”
“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” Nia says, her voice shaking as it comes through the receiver.
I close the windows on my screen and stand, reaching for my keys at the corner of my desk. “What happened?”
I can barely understand her while she dissolves into tear-and-panic-fueled speech, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m already on my way to my garage to climb into my car.
I’m on the road in less than two minutes, trying to calm her as she cries into the phone, and trying to get any information out of her so I know what exactly it is that I’m dealing with once I get to her.
I wouldn’t go to the home of any other client – ever. I would ask that they try to calm themselves down and tell them to come into the office in the morning, and I know that’s what I should do here.
I shouldn’t be flying down the fucking highway with my heart in my throat while I keep her on the line. I shouldn’t be so upset to hear her crying.
When I get to the house, I hang up the phone and let myself in as if I still live here. As if I have any business stepping inside of this building anymore. I follow the muffled sound of sobbing as I walk through the house, until I land in the living room.
Nia sits on the floor in front of the coffee table with a nearly-empty wine glass and a bottle of merlot sitting in front of her. She lifts her arm to wipe her eyes on the sleeve of a soft robe that covers her body, and I can see her body shaking.
Without my realizing it, I’m on the floor behind her in seconds, pulling her onto my lap as my arms wrap tightly around her body. My arms graze the skin of her chest as her robe parts in our embrace, and my heart slams against my rib cage.
This moment is all too familiar.
The smell of her hair wafts into my nose to flood my senses with citrus and jasmine, chased by the fruity aroma of the wine she’s been drinking. “I have you, you’re alright,” I tell her, and her hand wraps tightly around my forearm.
I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t even be in this house, right now. This single moment goes against every code of ethics that I agreed to and that I hold myself to.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she cries. “If there’s even a chance I could lose her, I can’t. It isn’t worth it. I want to call this off.”
“No you don’t,” I say as I tighten my hold around her body. “You’re tired, and you’re scared. We don’t give up. We fight and we win, because if we don’t fight, we lose. I need you to take a breath and tell me what happened. Can you do that for me?”
With a shaky nod, she pulls in a deep breath, holding it for just a few seconds before blowing it out. She repeats this process several times before reaching for her glass of wine and turning to face me.
Her eyes are bloodshot and puffy, as if she’d cried for an hour before finally deciding to call me. The tip of her nose is reddened, courtesy of both the tears and the wine, and a her hair is barely held in place by a bun at the back of her head that hangs onto its elastic for dear life.
And still, she’s beautiful.
My eyes rake over the exposed skin of her chest and to the silky pajama set she’s wearing, and I reach forward to pull her robe closed again.
Get it together, I tell myself. She’s a client, for crying out loud .
“Daniel called me,” she explains with a sniff, “and he said he would have me arrested for kidnapping if I don’t let him have Katie for a week. But he can’t do that, can he?”
“Until a custody agreement is in place, we need to be careful,” I tell her. “I know your husband’s team, and I know how they work. A little bit of give here will help you.”
“Can he have me arrested, Brody?” She demands.
With a sigh, I tell her, “Yes. So I need you to trust me . It’s time to revisit our conversation about letting him have some time with her.”
“Okay,” she nods.
She isn’t confident in my request. I’m asking her to do something that scares her, that’s going to cause her pain.
But she’ll do it for the sake of he daughter.
“From this point forward, you don’t answer his calls,” I tell her, pinning her in place with my eyes on hers. “He can speak to me, and he can do so through his team. You bring all voicemails and text messages to me .”
She leans forward with her glass in her hand until her head rests against my shoulder, and my entire body tenses. “You don’t think I should just stop here and stay with him? Just go back to being Mrs. Nia Hart and pretend that none of this ever happened?”
“If your daughter were in your position, would you want her to stay with a man who caused her this much pain or who was willing to use her child as a pawn to hurt her?” I ask her.
Her head shakes against my body with another sniff. “I’d tell her to run, and I would hunt the guy down and gut him fast enough that he’d be able to see his own heart beating in my hand.”
I let out a chuckle as my hand rests comfortingly between her shoulder blades. She may be a damsel, and she may be in distress, but Nia Cavanaugh does not need a hero. I have every confidence that, even without my help, she would be just fine on her own.
Even in her doubt, I believe that she knows exactly what she deserves and I trust her to fight for that.
I’ll make her fight for it.
“Then you don’t quit,” I tell her.
“She was a preemie,” she says, her face buried in my chest. She’s already told me this, but I don’t remind her. She just needs me to listen to her right now, and I can manage that much. “He was really mad at me for that. It wasn’t my fault,” she says with a sniffle, pulling away to wipe her sleeve across her face again. “She needed steroids, and he told me if I ‘let them drug his daughter,’ he would take her away and I would never see her again.”
I pull her against my chest again, gently massaging the back of her head while she dissolves once more into tears. I’m not a person who finds himself quick to anger; I’d like to think that I manage to keep a level head most of the time.
When it comes to Nia, that doesn’t seem to be true, because I find myself enraged at the thought of her husband saying that to her.
I find myself wanting to, as she described it, show him his own beating heart.
Neither of us move for at least another ten minutes, until her wine glass is emptied and back in its place next to the bottle on the table. As a tired haze pulls her eyelids down, I take her stumbling frame by the arm and walk down the hall with her toward the bedroom that up until recently, I called my own.
She’s decorated the space in muted tones of green and brown, with a few pops of a lighter yellow in some places. The king-sized mattress still sits against the wall in the same place that it always has, but she’s added a small upholstered bench at the foot of it, and several pairs of rubber clogs sit tucked neatly in a line beneath it.
A small chair sits in the corner of the room, covered in mismatched sets of scrubs, most of which are solid colors, but a few patterned pieces stand out among them. The dresser is lined with framed photos of herself and her daughter, from Nia’s pregnancy up until what looks like could have been as recent as last week.
Being in this space feels like a violation; as if I’m looking into parts of Nia’s life that she doesn’t share with other people. Parts that she certainly hasn’t yet shared with me. Parts that I have no right to see.
She drops onto the bed into a heap of wine-drunk exhaustion, and I maneuver the bedding to pull it over the top of her. I fight off too many instincts to do too many things – but I allow myself five seconds of freedom to brush her hair away from her face.
“Goodnight, Nia.”
Her eyes are already closed, but when I move to leave, she manages to stop me with a hand wrapped tightly around my wrist. “Can you not be my lawyer tonight?” She slurs. “Can you be my friend for a while, instead, and just…hold me for a minute?”
Shit.
“I can’t do that,” I tell her. My eyes scan the room until they land on the scrub-covered chair, and I reach for it, pulling it close while her hand stays firmly around my wrist. Settling into the chair, I tell her, “But I can be your friend and sit with you for a while.”
As she offers a sleepy nod and her grip on my wrist relaxes, I pull my cell phone from the breast pocket of my jacket and begin drafting a text message to Ezra. I need to talk to you about one of my clients . I stare at the message, considering the implication behind it and what might happen if I press send.
And then I look at her, and I delete every fucking word of it.